Thought Garage

  Kiran Bir Sethi shows how her groundbreaking Riverside School in India teaches kids life's most valuable lesson: "I can." Watch her students take local issues into their own hands, lead other young people, even educate their parents. Such a simple and inspiring motto : “One Idea. One Week. One Billion lives to change.”

The official Indian Currency, “Rupee” (INR) got its official currency Symbol now. You can use it now on web pages all over. Look how the symbol looks on a typical webpage  Picture Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign

Listen to this wonderful conversation between Scott Hanselman, Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson happened back in 2007 before we ever heard of ASP.NET MVC. Transcript here . Scott sits down with Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 signals and talks about beauty, making developers happen, the death (or life) of HTML, the future of Microsoft, and asks if we should care about Rich Internet Applications. DHH is the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, and Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks, well-known systems architect and Extreme Programming expert. --- Hansel Minutes   So delighted to see such a bold and open discussion between passionate developers with completely different backgrounds and ideas. Some how, this podcast explains a lots of things that were introduced in ASP.NET after 2007. Not suggesting that this has anything to do with that, but probably things must have been already moving in that direction, part

Listen to this wonderful presentation by Kent Beck on Developer Testing . Kent Beck is widely recognized as the father of eXtreme Programming and JUnit. Kent's other contributions to software development include patterns for software, and the rediscovery of test-first programming. He is the author/co-author of Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2nd Edition, Contributing to Eclipse, Test-Driven Development: By Example, Planning Extreme Programming, The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and the JUnit Pocket Guide. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon. Source : Kent Beck on Developer Testing .

Wondering which .NET version is the most popular version? Which .NET version got the most traction in the industry? Which version is the most discussed in the developer circles? Well, I am not sure if we have any public data that could answer any of those questions, particularly the commercial adoption part. But I looked at trends of search engine traffic and I found that these trends tell a story that is quite consistent with general perception. Look at the graph below illustrating the search trends of various .NET versions , captured from Google Trends . The story I believe is quite familiar to most .NET developers. I am not at all surprised to see .NET 1.1 still alive even in our searches, many companies are still running on .NET 1.1 and I guess haven’t found a compelling reason (that totally justify their investments) to upgrade. You can also see from the snapshot below, Visual studio editions follow the suit more or less closely along with respective .NET versions.

How many times in your whole life have you ever seen individuals or organizations admit their mistakes point blank without giving a spin or excuse? Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong . Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. -- Letter from Apple regarding iPhone 4 And the letter confirms that gripping iPhone 4 in a specific way could hurt its reception and thought its a design issue of iPhone. But I didn’t know that its the same way for any other mobile phone.

Google's logo for the 4th of July with a Goldberg's machine (its also Rude Goldberg's birthday).

Have you ever wondered how much spam you may be receiving on your blog? Make it a point to look at it, you might appreciate the work done by systems and people that are helping to stop this spam like never before. I have been using Akismet to help fighting with spam right from the moment I heard about it. Thanks a ton to Akismet, otherwise, I would have to manually moderate 235,193 spam comments on this blog. Thank you so much, Team Akismet. 99.949% of comments received on this blog are spam. I am delighted that  Akismet could kill the spam and saved me and scared at the same to see so much spam. It is totally unnecessary to include this pie chart here, as you can guess, you can’t miss the point.  I put it any ways in case you haven’t read those numbers above. Looking at this scary % of legitimate comments, I was worried and looked at Akismet website to see how my blog fares to global average of all blogs Akismet currently protects. It seems, I am getting undue spam on

Wonderful illustration of history of human communication by Google. To put things in context, we created this infographic to visualize some recent history of human communication and how Google Voice uses the web to help people communicate in more ways than ever before. Source: Google Voice Blog

TIME’s interview (questions collected from TIME magazine’s readers) of Manoj Night Shyamalan, one of my favorite directors. There are movies that anybody can make, and there are movies that are just meant to be made by Manoj. Such a unique talent, I just love his style.

Its a fact of life that " Our civilization runs on software ", as Bjarne Stroustrup said a few years back. Its no stretch to say, If we have to learn about any History, it must be the History of computers then. Learn how all this civilization began at Computer History Museum . I still remember looking at punch cards and floppies and writing my first Program in Fortran back in College. And running those programs on the latest and greatest computers then, a 386. The world of computers and software has changed at a spectacular pace since then. I am glad, I am part of it in my own ways.

In our time, many of us have been taught to strive for an insane  perfection that means nothing. To get wholeness, you must try instead to strive for this kind of perfection, where things that don’t matter are left rough and unimportant, and the things that really matter are given deep attention . This is a perfection that seems imperfect. But it is  a far deeper thing."  - Christopher Alexander , Iconic and Legendary Architect and Author that  created The Pattern Language It sounds so common sense, but unfortunately some of us just don't get it.